DAY OF THE DEAD

Quite fitting really, as I felt like one of them for much of it. I tried all the food at the street stalls and I think it was the deep fried chorizo bread with lettuce and cheese that got me.

Ara and Yvonne kept saying 'mmmm rico'... but I couldn't get past the fact that I was eating a bread roll of solid oil.

The Day of the Dead is amazing. It's like the most enormous carnival you can imagine. Mexicans believe that this is the day that their dead relatives are given permission to come and be with them. They put out offerings for them: their favourite food, drinks (there was a lot of tequila), cigarettes... everything that the spirit's senses couldn't normally appreciate. Music, incense... and tastes.

The cemeteries are a spectacle. Every grave is completely covered in the most equisite flowers and the family just sits there all day communing with the dead person.

Although, I have to say, they got a bit overboard with the incense. It's not sticks, it's big blocks of the stuff and when I say it's like being in the middle of a very aromatic bushfire, I mean it. I am really surprised some people aren't hospitalised with smoke inhalation.

Anyway, by the end of it I had a raging headache what with getting to bed at 6am the night before, eating the dodgy chorizo bread and inhaling all that smoke.

It was a fairly charming gridlock on the way out ... driving past cars full of people wearing full halloween costumes. I'm talking wolf heads and skeletons, entire face masks.

The kids in one town added a whole new meaning to trick or treat when they put a piece of string across a two-lane carriageway and trotted up to all the cars asking for lollies.

My most enduring memory, though, is an old woman sitting in candlelight beside a grave, alone. I guess it was her husband's. I started to wonder what she thinks about all day, does she reminisce about their years, does she talk to him in her head?

It's not a sad time. This is festive, there are people dancing.. eating together, bands playing. Men having competitions of who can electric shock themselves with the highest voltage.. that sort of thing.

That's what sets Mexico apart from us on death. We don't think about death, when people die, most of us don't talk to them, or share food with them. But here, it's like the line between before and after is not nearly so hard.. or so hard to cross. Call is superstition, or call it peace... whatever it is, it's a sight to behold.